"An
alteration in the metabolism," as F.H.A. Marshall suggests, "even in
comparatively late life, may initiate changes in the direction of the
opposite sex." Metabolic chemical processes may thus be found to furnish a
key to complex and subtle sexual variations, alike somatic and psychic,
although we must still regard such processes as arising on an inborn
predisposition.
Whatever its ultimate explanation, sexual inversion may thus fairly be
considered a "sport," or variation, one of those organic aberrations which
we see throughout living nature, in plants and in animals.
It is not here asserted, as I would carefully point out, that an inverted
sexual instinct, or organ for such instinct, is developed in early
embryonic life; such a notion is rightly rejected as absurd. What we may
reasonably regard as formed at an early stage of development is strictly a
predisposition; that is to say, such a modification of the organism that
it becomes more adapted than the normal or average organism to experience
sexual attraction to the same sex. The sexual invert may thus be roughly
compared to the congenital idiot, to the instinctive criminal, to the man
of genius, who are all not strictly concordant with the usual biological
variation (because this is of a less subtle character), but who become
somewhat more intelligible to us if we bear in mind their affinity to
variations.
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